hardcover, 336 pages
Published Sept. 29, 2020 by Del Rey.
A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets.
There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the monsters who lurk everywhere.
El is uniquely prepared for the school’s dangers. She may be without allies, but she possesses a dark power strong enough to level mountains and wipe out millions. It would be easy enough for El to defeat the monsters that prowl the school. The problem? Her powerful dark magic might also kill all the other students.
Loved the premise here, even if at times I questioned some of the internal logic of the magic laws at work. I was a little put off at the start by the narrative tone, but I eventually found a rhythm and it stopped bothering me. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
This book was such a slow burn for me. Coming highly praised, I came in here expecting a traditional school of wizardry tale. But your HP it is not. It's good though, very good.
Told from first person perspective, our narrator is Galadriel, a sophomore at the Scholomance, a deadly place of education indeed. The students learn magic simply by surviving the many horrors the school throws at them. There are no houses or anything the like, but alliances to make sure you survive your senior year. Students have to fight their way out, through masses of monsters.
Galadriel is a loner though. Secretly, she's one of the most powerful magic-users of the school, but she can only use spells of destruction. As the story progresses, Galadriel has to make alliances herself, and figure out if she and the most prolific monster killer of Scholomance, Orion Lake, are dating or …
This book was such a slow burn for me. Coming highly praised, I came in here expecting a traditional school of wizardry tale. But your HP it is not. It's good though, very good.
Told from first person perspective, our narrator is Galadriel, a sophomore at the Scholomance, a deadly place of education indeed. The students learn magic simply by surviving the many horrors the school throws at them. There are no houses or anything the like, but alliances to make sure you survive your senior year. Students have to fight their way out, through masses of monsters.
Galadriel is a loner though. Secretly, she's one of the most powerful magic-users of the school, but she can only use spells of destruction. As the story progresses, Galadriel has to make alliances herself, and figure out if she and the most prolific monster killer of Scholomance, Orion Lake, are dating or not?
You get zero exposition in the beginning, you're just thrown in, as Galadriel, called El, is saved by Orion. The magic system is a bit mind-boggling at first, and El is a bit of an unreliable narrator, as she's not super-likeable. She's an antisocial introvert. Takes time for her to thaw, took time for me to warm up to her.
It is a creative story, and it successfully breaks the mold of every other wizard academy story out there.
Anissa Dadia does an excellent job as narrator keeping you interested in a book that starts out featuring an angsty teenage dark mage who is in a terrible place by force. Naomi Novik deserves credit for setting up such a difficult task as an author. But as things progress, and the book wins the reader over, we get to see Novik’s ability to subtly include allegory on a number of real world social ills. That and some very nice language work… plus a very good ending making me get the second volume right away. 4.5 stars rounded up!
A lot of reviewers complained reasonably that the worldbuilding is pretty unbelievable at times, but I was having too much fun to notice.
I loved the big gimmick underlying the whole book: the protagonist has the talents and affinities to be the most powerful and destructive necromancer of her generation - there’s even prophecies about her! - but she was raised by pacifist hippies and works incredibly hard not to accidentally incinerate or mind-control her classmates, building power not by sacrificing animals but through push-ups and crochet.
